Another longish ride...

So I went on a pretty long ride today with my friend Albert, his wife and their son. It was tons of fun! Not nearly as much pain this time which was nice. I started to feel the pain about half way (20 miles or so) and decided to give myself a little knee massage while riding. What's weird is a minute or two later my left knee popped and I had no more pain for the rest of the ride! I wish my right knee had popped too...

I decided I wanted to ride a different bike so I pulled out my Nashbar Alpha Road 5000 to get it ready.

(Sorry...I haven't quite got the picture thing down on this site...)

I had previously taken the bars off of it to swap them onto my girlfriends Cannondale Black Lightning (Sorry...No pic yet). Albert was nice enough to give me another Nitto as a replacement but when I went digging for bars I realized that I had sold or given away the ones slated for this bike to someone and didn't have a decent replacement that would fit my new stem. Bummer deal!
So at this point I hauled the GF's bike off the hook to adjust it, air it up and swap the saddle for a nice Rolls I had laying around. It was then that I remembered that I had on a previous ride skidded the rear tire enough to go through the rubber...Doh! A tire change was in order but I didn't have a spare tubular so I started digging for a different wheel. It needed to be a 700c with a 7 speed freewheel. Well the only one I had laying around wasn't optimal 'cause the rim is a Fiamme Speedy with an angled sidewall and there was no freewheel. I just happened to have used freewheel in the stash so I cleaned it up, installed it and slapped the wheel in the dropouts. I messed with the limit screws a bit and adjusted the brakes to get them acceptable and took off to the rendezvous point to begin our ride. That's when I noticed the freewheel skipped in one gear. Just one!
Anyways...Other than the one skipping gear which I carefully avoided I had no other problems. There were tons of people out on the MUP which was both nice and frustrating at the same time. I was actually pretty stoked to see so many people out riding bikes and going for walks. I just wish they would pay more attention to their surroundings and be a bit more considerate to others.

All said...Today was a good day!

Oh ya! I also counted all the rear derailleurs in my collection this evening...
I'm up to 31! And there is only one Japanese one. A Shimano 600.

Cheers!

I'm soooo excited!

As I stated previously I absolutely LOVE bike parts...

A couple of days ago some very special skewers popped up in my saved searches on eBay. I decided I had to have them but couldn't justify the cost so I started selling off bike parts that I hope I may be able to live without. Mostly consumables and parts that I can find easily. I made a fair bit of coinage to offset the cost and decided I'd hit the BIN button before someone else did...

Long story short...I am now the proud owner of two truly elusive and utterly fantastic Pino Moroni skewers!

I'll write more about them and post pics when they show up. I can't hardly wait!

Cheers!

I'm a hurtin' unit....

I went for my first longish ride in quite awhile today. A measly 32 miles of virtually flat paved trail. I went with my friend Albert who was pulling his son in his kiddie trailer and we kept a kinda slow pace 'cause we were BS'in and enjoying the scenery. It was fantastic.....Until my knees blew up about 12 miles into the ride.
I just don't know what to think of it. I'm a youngish 30 something guy with a physical job and I think I'm in pretty darn good shape. Maybe it was the bike...It was my first long ride on it so maybe I don't have the fit dialed in. I've been riding it almost daily around town for 2 months but I've never ridden it more than 2 miles at a time.
This really sucks. I'm gonna do some research and try to figure it out. Maybe I'll revise my fit based on what I find out or maybe I'll just build up my mileage a bit before my next ride...I was braking in my new VeloOrange saddle too which was interesting to say the least. It's more like it was breaking me in. Ouch! The knees eclipsed the seat pain so it wasn't bad after a while.

So hear is the bike that I rode...The pic is from the mock up stage. It looks a bit different now.
My Peugeot 650b conversion:

Some peolpe suck...Big time!

Just a bit of a rant about how much some people suck.

I was passed in a school zone today on my way to work. Not only that...But the herkin' SUV driver decided to cross a double yellow line to do it. That's just slightly illegal in these here parts. Did I mention that the speed limit is 20 mph between 7 am and 4 pm? Oh ya! And I was going 23 mph...At 8:45 am. I know this because I looked down at the speedo just after it happened trying to understand WTF was going on. Amazing!

No wonder my girlfriend and I decide to walk to work 75% of the time. People like this kill people. WTF is soooo important that they needed to stop and sit at a stoplight literally 10 seconds after they passed me?

In a school zone, crossing the double yellow while I was exceeding the speed limit.

Some people suck...Big time!